Hi,
I'm looking for an XDCAM 1080i DolbyE hardware player that is able to play XDCAM disks and .mxf XDCAM files, but that doesn't cost a lot and that is not as big as a professional VTR. I mean, something more like a bluray than a VTR.
I recently bought a Panasonic 4K HDR bluray reader which also reads H.264 10bit files, but unfortunately, it doesn't read MPEG-2 files (XDCAM files). I could re-encode XDCAM files to H.264 as standard bluray and watch them at home, but I'd like to avoid that, also because 4:2:2 (yv16) -> 4:2:0 (yv12) introduces noticeable banding. I know that many of them don't have an HDMI output, but only an SDI one, which is not a big deal, though, 'cause I think there are SDI to HDMI converter cables out there.

And if you convert your mpeg-2 files into H.264 10bit, is there still banding ?

Well, no, but it supports H.264 10bit progressive, so I would have to deinterlace the master file and extract and re-encode audio from DolbyE to something else. I mean, it achieves a very good quality, but I thought I was just able to watch the XDCAM masterfile directly... That's a shame. I guess I'll just have to make my own encode of these files...
Something like this should probably work:

Dolby E is a professional audio format and it's not licensed for domestic playback. You won't find any domestic player able to play that audio stream. If you play a Dolby E stream with conventional player, you'll hear only a noise signal at very high volume.

Let's not forget that 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray disc content is encoded using HEVC 4.2.0 10-bit. Regardless of whether it contains HDR10. And it's much the same for HEVC encoded content for streaming services too...

XDCAM Disc drive for the PC? This would let you extract the MXF contents to a single MXF file and do what you want from there.

I've used the PDW-U2 on Windows before. It's just fine. We made a workflow to read one or more episodes of content off XDCAM Professional Discs into Grass Valley Edius, trim the tip and tail, and then re-export w/ smart encoding to standalone XDCAM HD422 MXF files which then went directly into playout servers without issue.

I'm sure you could extract the MXF files with the XCDAM Browser app and then use whatever transcoding you want